In business, we hear a lot about ‘development of sales cultures.’ Managers and business owners are told by countless experts that ‘building a sales culture’ is the most important thing they can be doing. Rarely do they explain how to build this culture.
Building a sales culture for your organization starts at the top and goes all the way down, well beyond sales teams themselves. Too often, organizations segregate sales and marketing from support and supply staff. Management should think of their products and services as the bread their business was built on and their sales and marketing teams as the butter that makes it edible. The two should be intimately entwined.
Starting At the Top
It’s not uncommon for sales managers, even VPs or CEOs, to see their role as being like a general in the military, giving orders and expecting results. For whatever reason, much of our modern corporate culture has created traditions that say that high level management is not always responsible for failures or problems in the sales or marketing staff. Even the VP of Sales might not be considered vital to the performance of his or her staff.
This is a costly, unnecessary mistake.
The Gallup Organization did research not long ago that showed that of sales professionals polled, 80% of them perceived their company’s management and corporate leadership through their relationship with their direct supervisor. This perception walks up the line, which means that a sales person sees corporate leadership through his team lead who will see it through her department head who likely is influenced by his VP who probably gets her perception from the CEO.
Successful Cultures Are Nurtured, Not Created
To build a successful sales culture, sales teams and corporate perceptions must be nurtured from the top. They cannot be forced or engineered from nothing. Every successful enterprise in history has always had a core culture that drove the company towards its goals and achievements.
Apple is known for its innovation-driven, singular vision. Google is known for its engineering focus and far out conceptualization and experimentation. Ford is known for its continual development of world-leading automotive technology and collaboration. The Canadian Parliament is known for its bickering and constant in-fighting. Every organization has an underlying culture that drives it.
The trick is finding the right culture for your operations and then nurturing that while starving incompatible ideas and cultures without stifling employee innovation and creativity. It’s a hard balance to reach, but once made, the growth and power potential of the organization explodes into action.
Defining Culture Itself
The first step is in defining what culture is to your organization. Culture is basically the attitudes and perceptions employees have of their work environment and employer – the organization and its management. Management that is too open, too accessible, or too ‘down to earth’ is not generally effective. Neither is management that is aloof, detached, and inaccessible.
Most assessment programs will poll employees on about a dozen core issues and through that measure outcomes like productivity, retention rates, profitability, and loyalty. These retention and loyalty rates for employees often coincide with retention and loyalty from customers, illustrating the link between successful corporate culture and success in business.